Advanced Energy Perspectives

Over the past two years, climate change has resurfaced as a top policy priority in Congress with policymakers from both parties offering ways to reduce carbon emissions. AEE has actively engaged in this conversation, testifying to Congress on how the country can achieve a 100% clean energy future in the power sector cost effectively. While many, including AEE, have focused on the need to establish a strong and enforceable target for meeting a 100% clean future, less attention has been paid to the ways wholesale electricity markets could drive toward this target, lowering consumers costs, expanding consumer access to clean energy, and reducing carbon emissions. That is, until now, as federal lawmakers are turning to expansion and improvement of wholesale markets as well as reducing barriers for advanced energy to access these markets as part of their plans.

Automakers are particularly vulnerable to economic downturns; just think back to the 2008-2009 financial crisis. So it should come as no surprise that EV sales, along with all others, are expected to drop in the coming year due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. But in the long term, nothing has changed. Manufacturers are gearing up their EV offerings, EVs continue to grow their worldwide market share, and gas-powered vehicles have hit their peak. What’s next, especially in the United States, is for the charging station build-out to match the coming demand – and realize the job gains and global competitive advantage that could come from a federal charging-station investment.

In just two short months, the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the American economy. The unemployment rate has reached levels that the country has not seen since the Great Depression nearly 100 years ago. Congress and the Trump Administration have responded by providing trillions of dollars of immediate relief to businesses and households to avoid even worse impacts. But no action has been taken on a simple measure that could help save hundreds of thousands of advanced energy jobs that otherwise may never return. The time to act is now, because time is running out.

Since 2016, the year when authoritative data first became available, we have been reporting the size and growth of employment in advanced energy on an annual basis. During that time, we have seen U.S. advanced energy jobs grow from 2.7 million in 2015 to 3.6 million in 2019. Each year the growth in advanced energy employment has outpaced growth in U.S. jobs overall, often by a factor of two or more. So it is with the latest numbers. But this is not like any other year. Rather, the job growth of last year is now overshadowed by the immediate job losses resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Now the critical jobs need is sustaining the industry during the lockdown – and making good on the employer expectations of growth coming into 2020 by driving the economic recovery to follow.

A decision handed down by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on a seemingly obscure issue in one regional power market threatens to have far ranging impact on the cost of electricity, the future of state policy, and the ability for advanced energy to compete – and win, as it has been doing – in the marketplace. FERC’s policy change is purportedly intended to address the “price suppression” in competitive wholesale power markets allegedly caused by resources that are supported by state policies like renewable portfolio standards (RPS) and zero emission credit (ZEC) policies. But what FERC’s decision will actually do is limit the ability of advanced energy resources to participate in the nation’s largest electricity market, force customers from New Jersey to Ohio to pay twice for the generating capacity they need,  steer funds to existing coal and natural gas power plants that are otherwise redundant, and undermine state policies that are explicitly intended to promote advanced energy deployment. How it will do so is complicated, but potentially devastating to the advanced energy economy that has been steadily growing in the United States.